A Short Time-Line of Developments in Quantum Mechanics

 

Gustav Kirchhoff:  Kirchhoff's Laws (of spectra) - ~1854

Gustav Kirchhoff

James Clerk Maxwell:  Maxwell’s Equations (Classical Field Theory of Electromagnetism) - 1865 

James Clerk Maxwell

Joseph Stefan 1879 & Ludwig Boltzmann 1884: Stefan-Boltzmann Law - ~1880   (Note:  Stefan was Boltzmann’s graduate advisor.)

Joseph Stefan      Ludwig Boltzmann

Wilhelm Wien:  Wien's Law - 1893

Wilhelm Wien

Max Planck:  Planck Curve - 1900

Max Planck

J. J. Thomson:  Plum-pudding model - 1904

J. J. Thomson

 Albert Einstein:  Photoelectric Effect - 1905  (Nobel Prize for PE effect - 1921)

Albert Einstein 1904

[The 1904 Thomson model was disproved by the 1909 gold foil experiment of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden]

Ernest Rutherford:  "Solar System" atomic model - 1911  (model from the results of the gold foil experiment – see above)

Ernest Rutherford

Niels Bohr:  Rutherford-Bohr atomic model - 1913

Niels Bohr

Louis de Broglie:  wave-particle duality - 1924

Louis de Broglie

"Full blown" Quantum Mechanics ~1926, with the publications of the “Schrodinger Equation” by Erwin Schrodinger

Erwin Schrodinger